A vehicle-mounted sensor apparatus for determining the state of at least one mechanical vehicle component is described that has at least one sensor element capturing a mechanical variable, wherein sensor data captured by the at least one sensor element are continuously capturable in any operating state of the vehicle, a communication element by means of which captured sensor data are transmittable to an external computer for further processing, and a computing unit for reducing the volume of data of the sensor data to be transmitted to the external computer.
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2. The sensor apparatus of claim 1 wherein the at least one sensor has a three-axis acceleration sensor and/or a three-axis angular or gyroscope sensor.
3. The sensor apparatus of claim 2 wherein the at least one sensor has an acoustic sensor and/or a vibration sensor and/or a temperature sensor.
4. The sensor apparatus of claim 1 further comprising a receiver configured to provide a geo-position determination, for assigning position data of the vehicle to the captured sensor data.
5. The sensor apparatus of claim 1 wherein the sensor apparatus is electrically and/or communicationally independent of a vehicle electronics system.
6. The sensor apparatus of claim 1 comprising a sensor module, which is configured to continuously provide sensor data with a specifiable sampling rate, a microcontroller for reducing the volume of data of the sensor data to be transmitted to the external computer, a data memory for caching the reduced sensor data, wherein the microcontroller divides the cached sensor data into digital data packets, which are cyclically transmittable by radio technology to the external computer.
7. The sensor apparatus of claim 1 wherein the reduction is further performed by pre-processing the captured sensor data to filter out irrelevant or redundant data components.
8. The sensor apparatus of claim 1 wherein the reduction is further performed by dividing the reduced sensor data into cyclically transmittable digital data packets.
11. The method of claim 10 wherein sensor data read out during an active sleep mode are initially cached in a buffer memory and the sensor data stored in the buffer memory are used when the specified threshold value is not exceeded to restore a previous time interval with respect to a relevant event.
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June 26, 2019
May 14, 2024
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